The difficulty of conceiving how it is possible to reason concerning our feelings, or to reduce them to the laws of discussion and philosophy, has, no doubt, led to the error, that we should trust, in all matters of taste, to feeling alone. This difficulty has been a stumbling-block not only to the unlearned, but to the learned; not only to those who feel without reasoning, but to those who reason without feeling. The following reflections, however, will enable us to perceive the possibility of reasoning concerning our feelings.

The beauties of nature are continually before our eyes, and we have, therefore, constant opportunities of noticing what is agreeable, from what is otherwise. We know not, it is true, why certain forms and colours are more agreeable than others, but, having once noticed that they are so, it must easily occur to us, that to produce a pleasing imitation of what is agreeable in nature, we must introduce into it such qualities as please us most when we perceive them in natural objects. Certain forms, attitudes, and expressions of the human countenance, for instance, please us more than other forms, attitudes, and expressions; and we naturally select those which please, and reject those which displease us. In contemplating, however, several beautiful faces, a painter cannot find any of them perfectly beautiful, not that he knows, a priori, what would constitute perfect

beauty, but that he perceives in the most pleasing countenance, some particular feature or part less pleasing than he beheld in other countenances. He admires the beautiful forehead, expressive eyes, and delicate lips of one man; but he does not perceive that fine mixture of red and white in his cheeks that appeared so agreeable to him in other faces. His eyebrows are not so well divided, and they are rather formal than neatly turned. The nose is large, and neither straight nor well squared; and the chin is neither white, soft, nor agreeably rounded, qualities which pleased him so much in other faces. On the other hand, where he sees the cheeks, nose, and chin marked with these pleasing forms, in another countenance, he has to regret the absence of the fine open forehead, the soft and delicate lips, and the bright and expressive eyes, that pleased him in the former. It is obvious, then, that in painting a beautiful face, he follows none of the models which nature presents to him, but selects from each what pleases him most. To produce, therefore, a fine and beautiful countenance, he must attentively study and compare all the different models which nature offers to his view, and exercise his own judgment in selecting what appears most, and rejecting what appears least calculated to impart delight. The work which he produces, and which is the result of this attentive

comparison, is therefore, in the strictest sense, a work of judgment, reasoning, comparison, and discussion. Every form and feature of beauty which appears in it, owes its existence to those various acts of judgment and comparison which he exercised during the composition and execution of the design; and all this investigation and comparison is only the investigation and comparison of his own feelings; so that it is obvious he has rendered his own feelings the direct objects of reasoning and discussion. It is also obvious, that all men are not so well qualified to judge of such a piece as they would be to judge of those appearances, which nature generally presents to them. In the first place, they must exercise the same acts of judgment which the artist exercised, before they can view the painting in the same light that he does; but to do so, they must have examined, with equal attention, the original forms in natural objects which he selected for his work. Those who give themselves this habit of comparison and examination are comparatively few, and of these few the number who would judge, and prefer as he has done, certain forms, colours, dispositions, attitudes, expressions, contrasts, and oppositions, to all others, are still much less in number. The attitude and expression which harmonize with some fancy or mental association, that exists perhaps only in his own mind, may

have little to recommend them to others, who never indulged such a fancy, or formed such an association before. Hence it is, that many things in the paintings of the sublime Angelo, appear outré and extravagant, to some of the best judges of painting.

It is certain, that the more excellence appears in any painting, the more the painter must have studied, examined, and compared the original beauties in nature from which he selected the matter of his work. It is equally certain, that, notwithstanding all this study, examination, comparison, and discussion, he has not attempted to introduce into it any feature of beauty, of which some archetype did not originally present itself in natural objects; for as he has no idea of the effect which any particular feature of beauty can produce, but by the emotion which it has produced in himself, and as he could not feel the emotion till that particular feature presented itself, and as there is nothing originally capable of presenting such a feature but natural objects, it requires no argument to prove, that he must have taken this feature of beauty from some natural object. He might, indeed, take it from some other painting, but it can still be ultimately traced to nature, for the first person who discovered and marked this feature of beauty, must have perceived it in some natural object. The imagination

could not originally have invented it, for, unlimited as the scope of imagination appears to be, all its perceptions, notions, and ideal creations, must have their patterns, or models, in the works of nature alone. The imagination is only exercised in reviving past images, or giving them new modifications of its own; but the matter of the modifications is always the same. It has no power of creating forms of which no prototype exists in nature, or of imparting qualities of which natural objects are incapable, and which were never suggested to it by its own sensations; and as these sensations were primarily derived from agency of sensible appearances, all its notions and conceptions of things and qualities must be ultimately referred to those things and qualities which first communicated the sensations themselves.

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As it appears, then, that the excellence of every painting is determined by the correctness of that judgment which was exercised in producing it, and as the correctness of this judgment is always determined by the degree of attention which it exercised in comparing the different models of beauty which it perceived in nature, and as the preference which this comparison gave to some forms over others was determined by the nature of the emotions, or feelings, which each form separately, or in composition, excited in the